YouTube Celebrates Fifth Anniversary, Announces Other Milestones

Video sharing website YouTube recently marked its fifth anniversary, and all signs point toward even bigger growth – and more video content being uploaded, broadcasted, and shared through the website.

According to the recent release of statistics, YouTube enjoys an astounding two billion hits every day – almost twice as much as people tuning in to America’s three biggest prime time TV stations. The milestone, which was announced in conjunction with the anniversary, also reflects a massive growth from when YouTube was founded in February 2005. While minor glitches and copyright issues have not been uncommon, the website has enjoyed more than its fair share of sensations and successes: the viral Iranian election protests video, President Barack Obama’s YouTube interview, the massive popularity of Nike’s Ronaldinho football commercial, and – more recently – the rise of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” music video to the top of the list of most watched videos ever on YouTube.

Here are other interesting YouTube facts:

Twenty-four hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.

The website’s user base, with an age range of 18-55, is evenly divided between men and women, with 51 percent visiting the website at least once a week.

70 percent of the site’s traffic comes from locations outside the U.S.

The average YouTube user spends 15 minutes a day on the site.

The most subscribed YouTube channel of all time is that of Asian comedian Ryan Higa, who so far has 2,243,387 subscribers.

With amateur and professional filmmakers, musicians, politicians, comedians, news reporters, businesses, Internet marketers, and all other kinds of users visiting the site to watch or broadcast videos, YouTube has become in a span of five years the most popular video publishing website in the world, as well as the World Wide Web’s second biggest search engine, next only to Google. The company, which owns YouTube, also marked the website’s fifth anniversary with the announcement that it will start publishing localized content in South Africa. This means that YouTube users in the continent will be able to see more local video content closely matching their interests.